Consumer Goods

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Consumer Goods

A few years ago I was walking around my old hometown, Portland, Oregon. I walked past a basketball court full of teens wearing Ambercrombie shirts and Nike shoes. "Bro, why don't you get some of these cool clothes, rather than that boring and odd shirt you have on? one of them said to me. "No, thanks. I like what I have on." I wasn't going to let them persuade me to waste my money on expensive popular clothing when I already liked what I was wearing.

As you can see by my experience, many Americans, especially high school students, shop to "look cool" by wearing popular clothing. They emphasize wearing the right type of clothes. For instance, an adolescent clothing addict named Delia Cleveland believed "clothes made the woman and everything else was secondary" (193). Teenagers buy the right clothes so they'll be popular. In high schools today, many students are seen with an "Ambercrombie & Fitch" label or shirt bearing the name of the company. That's because they "repeatedly rank it near the top in terms of coolness." (Cave 199). By wearing the A&F clothes, people see them as "cool" and therefore respect them. However, it's not always about wearing a certain company's clothes to look cool; it can be about wearing the right color clothes or buying caps that show a logo of a sports team.

Why do teenagers make such a big deal out of wearing the right kinds of clothes? A big reason is the fact that many of them go to rough high schools, so they have to wear the right type of clothes, because if they don't, they might get picked on. I have had many friends in this situation. This can make them get used to wearing popular clothing, and then they really start doing it, possibly even to show off their clothes. Luckily I've never had to go to high school (I was homeschooled), so I haven't had to go through with looking cool by wearing popular clothing. IN my opinion, clothes are clothes, and it doesn't make any difference what they look like. But in America today, often that's not the case.

Another reason people buy what they buy is because the media influences them greatly, with symbols and rule-breaking strategies. On the telvision today I often see commercials influencing the viewer to buy a prodcut, one way or the other.

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